Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
As official efforts faltered, amid aging equipment and crumbling infrastructure, Syrian civil society moved quickly to support the afflicted farmers, forming emergency networks that sent hundreds of volunteers into the fire zones to deliver supplies and support where government services could not reach.
I’m convinced that the more people experience the humanizing benefits of direct connections and mutual support, the more bridges can be built in the future. We can learn by doing. As the saying goes, we can act our way into different ways of thinking more easily than we can think our way into new ways of acting.
We can start with the concept of sharing, of commoning, and then try to work out together how we can common the land and potentially, what’s produced on it. It’s anarchic in the sense that it’s massively decentralised, with lots of tiny nodes that together can provide the clothing and textiles that we need to live.
As the ecological situation worsens, we don’t have the luxury of snubbing potential solutions. Let’s not be the ones who died of an illness because the name of the remedy sounded silly.
Do we blindly feed our consumption addiction, indifferent to how—or whether—resources can be replenished? Or do we transition from consumer to replenisher, and become responsible stewards, ensuring that what we take today will sustain life tomorrow?
Here, perhaps is the secret to also countering the far right, not with ameliorative green growthism but with radical, redistributive, anti-commodity leftism – recovering that underground tradition of socialism that starts from a critique of capitalism’s turning everything into a commodity, and instead focusing on what we all need to lead a decent dignified life, within safe limits.
If a theoretical economy relies on the exchange of intended things, a profitable economy relies on the waste produced by the production, distribution and sale of those things.
In tandem with the 80th United Nations General Assembly, we’re asking a vital question: where do we find hope at such a challenging time? And the answer is in our cities.
For degrowth thinkers and activists, this means not only rejecting extractivism in theory but learning from the everyday practices of those who are working on alternatives. But it also means finding hope and direction in the grounded, collective visions blooming across the Sabana de Bogotá.
What is a collapse? Do I believe in collapse? If so, what kind of collapse do I envision and what will come thereafter? Is the current system collapsing?
In this week’s Frankly, in a continuation of his ‘What I Learned This Week’ series, Nate updates viewers on things he learned in the past week, and the implications for our sociocultural trajectory. This edition focuses on recent financial and political headlines – global gold holdings, shifting geopolitical energy deals, and new U.S. Department of Energy reports – and explains their relevance to our biophysical reality and broader geopolitical landscape.
From deregulated economic zones to experiments in private governance, charter city projects aim to reshape how we live. Their rise compounds concerns over sovereignty and the ideological and financial interests driving them.
